Improving the Uplink Performance of Drive-Thru Internet via Platoon-Based Cooperative Retransmission

For many vehicular safety applications, it is critical to timely and reliably deliver multimedia data from a traveling vehicle to a roadside access point (AP) in an error-prone vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), which is a typical uplink scenario for drive-thru Internet. To achieve this goal, we propose a cooperative retransmission scheme that exploits a common phenomenon in reality, in which consecutive vehicles can naturally form a platoon to reduce energy consumption. We develop a 4-D Markov chain to model the proposed scheme and analyze the uplink throughput of drive-thru Internet, which also reveals some fundamental relationships among traffic flow, platoon parameters, and system throughput. We conduct extensive simulation in OMNeT++ to validate our scheme and the analytical model. Numerical results show that the proposed platoon-based cooperative retransmission scheme significantly improves the uplink throughput of drive-thru Internet, considerably decreases the total transmission times for a given quantity of upload data, and, hence, achieves a greener mobile multimedia communication.